Darwin's “Natural Science of Babies”

In 1877, the newly founded British journal Mind published two papers on child development. The earlier, by Hippolyte Taine, prompted the second article: an account of his own son's development by the naturalist Charles Darwin. In its turn, Darwin's paper, “A Biographical Sketch of an Infant,” influenced others. Diary studies similar to Taine's and Darwin's appeared in Mind from 1878. In addition, the medical profession started to consider normal child language acquisition as a comparison for the abnormal. Shortly before his death in 1882, Darwin continued with his theme, setting out a series of proposals for a program of research on child development with suggested methodology and interpretations. Darwin, whose interest in infants and the developing mind predated his 1877 paper by at least 40 years, sought to take the subject out of the nursery and into the scientific domain. The empirical study of the young child's developing mental faculties was a source of evidence with important implications for his general evolutionary theory. The social status of children in England was the subject of considerable discussion around the time Darwin's 1877 paper appeared. Evolutionary theory was still relatively new and fiercely debated, and an unprecedented level of interest was shown by the popular press in advance of the publication. This article considers the events surrounding the publication of Darwin's article in Mind, the notebook of observations on Darwin's children (1839-1856) that served as its basis, and the research that followed publication of “Biographical Sketch.” We discuss the impact this article, one of the first infant psychology studies in English, made on the scientific community in Britain in the latter half of the nineteenth century

Second cancer risk in adults receiving autologous haematopoietic SCT for cancer: A population-based cohort study

Population-based evidence on second cancer risk following autologous haematopoietic SCT (HCT) is lacking. We quantified second cancer risk for a national, population-based cohort of adult Australians receiving autologous HCT for cancer and notified to the Australasian Bone Marrow Transplant Recipient Registry 1992-2007 (n=7765). Cancer diagnoses and deaths were ascertained by linkage with the Australian Cancer Database and National Death Index. Standardized incidence ratios (SIRs) were calculated and Cox regression models were used to estimate within-cohort risk factors treating death as a competing risk. During a median 2.5 years follow-up, second cancer risk was modestly increased compared with the general population (SIR 1.4, 95% confidence interval 1.2-1.6); significantly elevated risk was also observed for AML/myelodysplastic syndrome (SIR=20.6), melanoma (SIR=2.6) and non-Hodgkin lymphoma (SIR=3.3). Recipients at elevated risk of any second cancer included males, and those transplanted at a younger age, in an earlier HCT era, or for lymphoma or testicular cancer. Male sex, older age (>45 years) and history of relapse after HCT predicted melanoma risk. Transplantation for Hodgkin lymphoma and older age were associated with lung cancer risk. Second malignancies are an important late effect and these results inform and emphasize the need for cancer surveillance in autologous HCT survivors. © 2014 Macmillan Publishers Limited